Violation of Judicial Independence and Due Process in the Unification Church Case in Japan. 1. Non-Respect of Article 14 ICCPR

The dissolution case against the Church violates due process of law on multiple grounds.

By Patricia Duval

July 9, 2025

Japanese Unification Church believers calling for the respect of their freedom of religion or belief, Ibaragi, 2024.

The present report concerns violations of Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR” or “Covenant”) relating to the independence and impartiality of the judiciary in Japan.

This case is brought by the members of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (formerly named the Unification Church, hereafter “Family Federation” or “Unification Church” or the “Church”).

The Tokyo District Court issued an order dissolving the Church’s religious corporation status on March 25, 2025, and the case is currently under appeal at the Tokyo High Court.

Should this decision be upheld on appeal, the corporation, which has to date provided vital support to over 600,000 believers and which offers pastoral care for the entire religious community nationwide, will be disbanded, its real estate and all other assets, including money, confiscated, leaving all believers isolated and deprived of a supportive faith community around them.

Conclusive evidence of the lack of judicial independence: the government is already organizing the liquidation of the Church’s assets while the High Court has yet to rule on the case, sure of the outcome of the appeal.

The whole dissolution process constitutes a violation of due process of law on multiple grounds.

First, the interpretation of the law on religious corporations was changed overnight to allow dissolution. “Violation of the law” has been interpreted to include civil torts, thus enabling an order for the dissolution of the Unification Church to be issued merely based on civil claims filed by former members.

The civil tort rulings on which the dissolution decision relies are based on violations of “social appropriateness,” and they were deemed to constitute a serious harm to “public welfare,” concepts so vague that they inevitably lead to an arbitrary and discriminatory application. Recurrent recommendations by the UN Human Rights Committee have urged Japan to stop using “public welfare” to restrict freedom of religion or belief.

A view of the Tokyo District Court. Credits.

Most plaintiffs in those tort rulings were subjected to “deprogramming,” i.e. abduction, confinement and coercion to recant their faith, as mentioned in civil courts’ findings. They were coerced into filing civil claims to prove their real intention to leave the Church and be released from confinement, which demonstrates their profound faith at the time of the events and undermines their claims.

The non-scientific and discredited theory of “mind control” was used to reject all the evidence provided by the Church of the plaintiff’s faith at the time and to deny application of the statute of limitations. Ancient facts were admitted against the Church as the plaintiffs were deemed to be under mind control until they met with anti-Unification Church lawyers. Also, as the court found that there were no claims against the Church in recent years, the same theory was used in the dissolution decision to include hypothetical victims who never filed any claims and who, it was claimed, would need to be considered still to be under undue influence, to inflate the number of victims and the “harm” done to “public welfare.”

The hearings were held behind closed doors because the procedure for dissolving religious corporations is considered a “non-contentious” procedure; this resulted in the fabrication of testimonies and the violation of the right to a fair public hearing.

In 1987, in Japan, a group of attorneys of radical left-wing political persuasion created a network of lawyers to eradicate the Unification Church from Japan. The association, known as the National Network of Lawyers against Spiritual Sales (“NNLSS”), was established with the express aim of eliminating the Unification Church at a time when the latter was opposing atheistic Communism, the expansion of which it saw as a threat to spirituality in Asia in the post-World War II era.

The Network started to combat the Church actively and, to this end, supported the violent “deprogramming,” coerced de-conversion from alleged “brainwashing” of Church members, who were then forced into testifying as “victims” and into suing the Church for damages.

Attorney Hiroshi Yamaguchi, one of the founders of the Lawyers’ Network. Screenshot.

Over forty years, around 4,300 members of the Unification Church in Japan were subjected to this violent deprogramming. They were abducted and confined by families, and forced to submit to indoctrination by “deprogrammers,” who were usually Protestant pastors. This consisted of harsh criticism of Unification Church beliefs and false reports on its alleged criminal activities.

This confinement and indoctrination were most often carried out over months or years, until the victims would finally recant their faith and agree to leave the Church.

This practice ceased after a recommendation to Japan by the UN Human Rights Committee in August 2014 to “take effective measures to guarantee the right of every person not to be subject to coercion that would impair his or her freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief” (CCPR/C/JPN/CO/6). A few months later, in November 2014, for the first time, a victim of such misdeeds, Mr. Toru Goto, was awarded substantial damages in a civil case against his family and two deprogrammers by the Tokyo High Court for the twelve-year illegal confinement and forced persuasion he was subjected to. The Supreme Court later upheld this ruling.

Until then, the Lawyers’ Network used and encouraged these faith-breaking practices for decades, by referring parents to the pastors specialized in the so-called “rescue” of believers, who would send the broken-faith members back to the lawyers. The now former members were then coerced into suing the Church to prove their apostasy and to be released from confinement.

At a meeting in 1991, Network lawyers and pastors of the United Church of Christ of Japan (UCCJ), who had initiated the practice of “rescuing” members and who saw the Unification Church as a competing religious movement, declared their common purpose of “destruction” of the Church and their intention to achieve it through the filing of financial claims by deprogrammed members (see article published in the “Kyodan Times,” the newspaper of UCCJ, on November 16, 1991).

The systematic filing of civil suits resulted in several tort rulings over the years, in which those who, after deprogramming, had been forced to play the role of plaintiffs claimed that they had been “mind-controlled.” Based on such rulings, the lawyers eventually pressured the government to file for dissolution of the Church, a request the Tokyo District Court granted on March 25 this year.

Source: bitterwinter.org